The renowned contemporary Egyptologist, Mark Lehner, thinks it may have been a supremely gaudy statue that, alongside the adjacent pyramids, was part of "a vast sacred machine designed to harness the power of the sun to sustain the earthly and divine order".
Haw's remark that the physical constraints of the project pushed him into designing "sacred moments" is rather apt.
Clearly, there is a strong autobiographical element in the portrait of an artist who, when he loses faith in God, gives up designing sacred buildings and chooses instead to make domestic ones – only to find making homes equally unsatisfactory.
Piano will be spending the afternoon with the construction crew now working on the Church of Thanksgiving, a vast sacred building he designed to hold a maximum capacity of 8,000 souls.
The building committee, advised by the Rev. Gilbert Sunghera, an architecture professor at the University of Detroit Mercy and consultant on the design of sacred spaces, met with a dozen architecture firms.
The communicative failure of many of the synagogues built in the United States in the last 50 years underscores a paradox central to synagogues in every period: how should one design a sacred space for a religion that resists the sanctification of space?
Showing us initial sketches, sections of figurative imagery or, in the case of the abstract designs, the sacred geometry used by Indian painters to plan paintings, they help us see the complexity of the finished compositions.
Nothing is sacred to coaster designers, who tinker with seating, launch methods, magnetic accelerators and track design.
On bad days, he'll rape and pillage something sacred like Santa Cruz skateboard designs and get hit with a lawsuit.
